String comparisons based on traditional techniques of matching characters and character clusters (polygraphs) do not capture points of similarity that depend upon knowledge of character phonetics, e.g., that in English “ph” usually represents the same sound as “f.” While a typographic error in a string generally results in an unrelated symbol being substituted for the correct one, misspelling errors may result in symbols that sound equivalent to the correct symbol. Some current methods of search and string comparison incorporate phonetic equivalents within search results, but often irrelevant search results are found due to serendipitous associations of phonetically equivalent strings. Furthermore, current methods double the amount of computation, since twice as many comparisons are performed for a given query string.